Running Away to the Circus; In Anxious Times, Crowds Get Thrills and Catharsis

The Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus arrives tomorrow in a city overstressed by Iraqi threat-assessment coverage and reeling from Orange Alert fatigue. All this in a season awash in reality-television freak shows, in an era where some Nascar fans favor crashes over races and in a time when professional wrestling is more and more about slam-bang swagger.

The circus is promoting its show as ''the single most thrilling edition of the Greatest Show on Earth ever produced.'' And for once the hokum is on target, because act after act -- from six roaring motorcycles in the 16-foot-wide Globe of Death, to a fiery human cannonball and a star clown's high-wire pratfall -- keeps spectators' shoulders tied in knots for two hours and six minutes.

Amid the winds of war, is all this bunkum proof positive that, as in ancient Rome, the citizenry is being pacified with bread and circuses while the barbarians are at the gates?

Exhibit A: Already jittery audiences have been flocking to the circus's performances in the Meadowlands and at the Nassau Coliseum in advance of the show's traditional opening night in Madison Square Garden.

While the privately held show has never disclosed audience numbers, Kenneth Feld, the producer and chief executive of the circus, said attendance had spiked recently and is up 15 percent over all since Sept. 11, 2001.

Exhibit B: When the circus recently visited Hampton and Norfolk in Virginia, Mr. Feld said, ''we played to full houses of military families and got letters of thanks from the commanders.''

Peter W. Meineck, a professor of classics at New York University, said he believed that the venerable bread and circus analogy rings true today.

''At times of great crisis in the classical world,'' he said, ''the games definitely went up in popularity.

''Then as now, people want to be distracted from the realities -- especially the barbarian at the gate, the unknown, the other. Such threats remind us that our so-called civilization is very fragile.''

For 133 years, the circus has tapped into America's deepest fears and strongest desires, and audiences have often sought out the show in wartime. Indeed, President Franklin D. Roosevelt gave the circus special dispensation in World War II to use precious rail capacity to travel around the country to lift morale.

Through the decades, a certain cyclical faddishness has often driven the show's themes -- elegant displays, glamorous spectaculars and celebrations of oddities. LaVahn G. Hoh, a professor of theater arts at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville who teaches a course on the history of the American circus, said, ''This time around, the theme is thrills.

''But there is a difference between the circus and reality television, and wrestling, and thrill shows on video,'' said Professor Hoh, who saw the new Ringling show in Richmond, Va. ''In the circus, what people see is real, and the performers' feats you see before your eyes are not edited or time-delayed.''

Mr. Feld, too, dismisses reality television. ''In shows like 'Fear Factor,' everything is all set up -- it's all very carefully controlled,'' he said. ''It's edited. And it's on a small television screen. But in the circus, audiences aren't seeing special effects. It's the real thing. And real people could really get hurt.''

Some of those interviewed at a recent performance embraced the thrills as part of a communal experience. ''You don't feel worried because you have to love just being here in the arena -- the crowd and the whole aura of the circus,'' said Chris Campanelli of New Milford, N.J., who brought his wife, Pat, to the Meadowlands with their daughters Jennifer, 11, April, 8, and Gabby, 6.

But for other audience members, the current impulse to gather together is clouded by dark anxieties. ''I had some difficulty coming to the arena, given the fact that it is a large event and security can never be perfect,'' said Rita Wiley, whose brother Daniel M. Van Laere of Glen Rock, N.J., was killed on the 98th floor of the south tower of the World Trade Center. ''Since 9/11, I am now more alert.''

It was a fear that she did not voice to two of her grown daughters, Jessica and Rebecca, and her 2-year-old granddaughter, Hailey Malone. ''My daughters don't like to see me sad,'' Ms. Wiley explained. ''And it feels good to be around people who are enjoying this so much.''

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Mark Oliver Gebel, the show's 32-year-old star tiger trainer, said performing ''is a way for us to distract ourselves from the terror alerts, too.'' The Ringling show he travels with -- the Red Unit -- last visited New York two years ago in the spring of 2001, ''and the first time I saw the new skyline over Manhattan, well, I was stunned.''

And Russian aerialists in the Sky Surfers troupe accomplish what the circus trumpets as the ''world's longest continuous human flight,'' as a daring young man traverses 180 feet across trapezes, bungee cords and a trampoline above the three rings.

Then there are the Torres Brothers, who ride six motorcycles simultaneously -- and unprecedentedly -- in the steel Globe of Death. Their 40-mile-per-hour traffic jam is so scary ''that our mom has never seen us do the act, she cannot bring herself to watch,'' said Ramon Torres, 32, the oldest brother. Their mother, Perla Torres, is safely unaware back home in Caaguazú, Paraguay.

The new Ringling Brothers show is also a pyromaniac's delight, punctuated 14 times with an assortment of noisy fireworks variously dubbed silver airbursts, fountain sparklers and gold glitter mines. Did they rethink this after the fatal nightclub fire in West Warwick, R.I.?

''We never considered taking pyro out of the show after Rhode Island,'' Mr. Feld said, because Ringling shows are rigorously vetted by fire inspectors. ''The week when the Rhode Island fire was very much in the news, people in the audience seemed to react to the pyro -- there were oohs and aahs and screams. But as soon as the story died down, that reaction was gone.''

Why, in a time of chronic alert, are audiences rushing to take their anxiety up a notch? Professor Meineck has an answer: ''Live performance is always connected with catharsis -- and the pure translation of that word means healing.''

Nevertheless, catharsis, he added, can work on several levels, ''including schadenfreude, where you wish others ill and you thank God that some horrible thing in the arena isn't happening to you.''

But Professor Hoh said he believed that circus audiences did not want to see people get hurt. ''People find circus accidents very distressing because they want the performers to cheat fate,'' he said. ''They are looking for hope, and they love the thrill of beating the challenge of death.''

Certainly, too, they seek good old-fashioned escape. ''People come here to forget about headaches and heartaches,'' said the Red Unit's star clown, Bello Nock, who commits heart-stopping tomfoolery on the high wire 30 feet over the tanbark, pausing only long enough to slick back his vertical red hair.

But reality keeps raising the bar. ''I think people are becoming more jaded,'' Mr. Feld said, ''thanks to the impact of television, and also the effect of video games on our younger customers. Audiences seem to want more thrills. And as the American attention span gets shorter, the tempo of our shows is getting faster and faster.''

And audiences seem ever more eager. ''We are pulled to these displays, because there is a side of us that likes being scared, and we sort of need that,'' Professor Meineck said.

He cautioned, however, that ''history has yet to tell us that this works as a distraction for everyone.''